Chief scribe
The chief scribe has received the email below from our friends at CiviCRM. It’s an invitation to the next CiviCRM meetup in Central London next week. I am emailing to let you know about our upcoming CiviCRM meetup next Wednesday 9th May. We had a great turn out at the last meetup with 3 great […]
We learn from Joinup that Hungary’s government is investing some €1.23 million in a three-year project to improve applications which use Open Document Format (ODF). The funds are being split between the University of Szeged’s Software Engineering Department and Multiracio, an open source IT specialist developing EuroOffice office applications based on the LibreOffice and OpenOffice […]
Over the weeks, we’ve kept an eye of what’s happening in the Cabinet Office’s open standards consultation (news passim) and have noticed too that the usual suspects have been trying to nobble it. News has just arrived via the Free Software Foundation blog that a joint statement has been issued by a group of UK […]
Bristol’s bid to host Wikimania in 2013 (news passim) has been unsuccessful.The following email was posted to the Wikimania mailing list yesterday: Dear all, It is my pleasure to announce that the jury has been able to come up with an intermediate result – and I would like to share with you the fact that […]
A CiviCRM training session will be held in Exeter from 9.00 am to 4.00 pm on Tuesday 12th June at Exeter CVS, King William Street, Exeter, EX4 6PD (map) This will be comprehensive hands-on training course covering the configuration, administration and every-day use of CiviCRM. The event is aimed at administrators and users in organisations […]
Joinup reports that figures provided by Munich’s Mayor, Christian Ude, reveal that switching to a Linux-based open source desktop reduces costs and results in fewer calls to help desks, and that replacing the current pool of almost 10,000 open source desktops with a proprietary system would increase costs by some 25%. Moreover, the latter would […]
Wikimania is an annual international conference for users of the various projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation (e.g. Wikipedia and its sister projects). It includes presentations and discussions include Wikimedia Foundation projects, other wikis, open source software, free knowledge and free content, and the different social and technical aspects which relate to these topics. It’s […]
A new e-petition has appeared on the Government’s e-petitions site entitled ‘Migrate all government IT to Linux based systems’ (as it’s in a good cause, we’ll ignore the original petitioner’s woeful lack of a hyphen between Linux and based in the title. Ed. 🙂 ) The body of the petition reads as follows: Responsible department: […]
Tonight Bristol Wireless volunteers Jules and BenG are going to the Novers Park Community Centre to visit South Bristol Amateur Radio Club to give a talk on the work of Bristol Wireless. Jules has offered to do a write-up following the talk, so call back soon to read the details! 🙂
Yesterday Bristol’s Evening Post, the city’s newspaper of record (really? Ed.), carried the news of Bristol Wireless’ shortlisting for the Santander Social Enterprise Awards (which were being organised locally in conjunction with the Quartet Community Foundation). We’d originally applied for the award after a report on them was spotted by a keen-eyed Bristol Wireless volunteer […]
More than 100 North Lancashire residents gathered in a field at Quernmore on Saturday to make internet history. They were all members of the B4RN (Broadband for the Rural North) project, a community-led company which is about to install some of the fastest internet connections in the world into homes and businesses in the area. […]
The University of Bristol has announced it has joined forces with the Universities of Oxford, Southampton and University College London to form a Centre for Innovation to share state-of-the-art equipment and world-leading skills, speeding up the rate at which complex data can be processed and will play key role in a new £3.7 million regional […]
On Monday, 30th April 2012 the Policy Exchange think tank is organising an event entitled Open Standards for Open Government? at The Ideas Space, Policy Exchange, 10 Storey’s Gate, Westminster, SW1P 3AY (map). The UK Government is currently consulting on its open standards policy. Technology standards are important to ensure interoperability; open standards are often […]
Bristol Wireless was donated* some redundant laptops yesterday that were surplus to requirements. Their arrival has encouraged volunteer Acesabe to try experimenting, as about an hour ago he tweeted: Think I’ll have a pop at installing ChromeOS on one of those old laptops we got donated @BristolWireless yesterday http://chromeos.hexxeh.net Please let us know how it […]
Do you know a certain politician who should really learn more about Open Standards? This is the question that the Free Software Foundation Europe has asked in the last couple of days. The article goes on to ask readers if they have tried to explain the importance of Open Standards to your boss, friends, local […]
Scotrail has just secured £250,0000 of funding from the Scottish government for a three month pilot project to trail the provision of free wifi on trains. According to Guardian Government Computing, the pilot will run from June until September on trains travelling primarily between Glasgow and Edinburgh. An ethernet backbone will be installed a total […]
All public sector organisations in Iceland are increasing their use of free and open source software, Joinup reports, and the country’s government recently launched a one year migration project for all of its departments. Project leader Tryggvi Björgvinsson states: “The goal of the project is not to migrate public institutions to free and open source […]
Our friends at Bristol Hackspace now have a chat channel, as testified by the following status update on Twitter. We have an IRC channel. Chat with us on irc.freenode.net in #bristolhackspace or on the website: http://bristol.hackspace.org.uk/chat/ We might see you in there for a natter sometime! 🙂
This year’s Document Freedom Day, which celebrates information accessibility and raises awareness of Open Standards, will take place on Wednesday, 28th March. Here in Bristol Wireless, we’ve been using the Open Document Format (ODF) Open Standard for exchanging documents internally for many years now. We like it since it has many advantages: firstly, there’s the […]
In about one month’s time (April 21st to be precise, according to Sam Downie. Ed.) a delegation of Bristol Wikipedians is due to visit Monmouth. Why Monmouth you may ask? And why Wikipedians too? What has a small Welsh town with a millennium or so of history, that was home to the Tudor family and […]